omg.lol is the Internet We Need Right Now
There's something genuinely delightful I discovered that I need to tell you about right now. Something that made me, a person who has spent countless hours wrestling with corporate platforms and their endless enshittification, actually excited about the web again.
Let me back up. A few days ago, I wrote about how you need to move to a better Internet in 2026, recommending platforms that seem more ethical and less corporate, but most importantly more fun. I thought I'd done my homework. I believed I'd mapped out the landscape of independent web services worth your attention. Then I stumbled upon omg.lol.
I was browsing Personal Sites, a wonderful directory showcasing dozens of websites made by hand (as opposed to the overpriced, clunky platforms like Squarespace, Weebly, or Wix). There's so much inspiration here, just completely off-the-wall designs and personality leaking through every UX choice.
That's when I found Daryl Sun's Journal. Thoughtful writing yet such a fun design. The kind of site that makes you want to slow down and actually read. In her colophon (a word we should all use more often, it means the details about how something was made), she mentioned the site was powered by weblog.lol, which was part of omg.lol.
omg dot lol.
The domain name alone made me smile. Not dot-com's capitalist certainty. Not dot-org's nonprofit gravitas. Just... lol. A domain extension that's the acronym for laughing out loud, chosen by someone who clearly remembers when the Internet was fun. I had to know more. Within five minutes of reading about it, I joined. Let me tell you why.
omg.lol is a service created by developer Adam Newbold, who also runs NeatNik, a tiny Internet company building thoughtful tools for people who care about the web.
To start, it's fun. There is such joy and whimsy in the UX. There's the heart mascot, Prami and the Pigeon, Penelope both greeting you on the homepage. At home.omg.lol, you create a profile page reminiscent of the old About.me (before it got acquired and ruined and is now... AI?). Think of it as your digital business card, but with personality. Edit it in Markdown. Make it pretty. Add links. Share who you are without an algorithm deciding how people discover you.
The profile sits alongside a customizable webpage that's refreshingly simple to set up. No drag-and-drop hell or "premium features" locked behind arbitrary tiers. Just you, some HTML/Markdown knowledge (which you can learn in an afternoon or two), and a space that's actually yours.
weblog.lol is their blogging platform. It's Markdown-based with reasonable customization <head> and CSS options. Not WordPress's overwhelming dashboard of plugins and security nightmares, but also not a minimalist trap that gives you three fonts and no control. It's reasonable. Thoughtful. Built for people who want to write and share their work without becoming system administrators.
Based on Derek Sivers' philosophy, omg.lol also gives you a dedicated **/now**page, a place to answer the question "What are you focused on right now?"
Sivers created the concept in 2015 because people kept asking what he was up to, and he kept typing the same response. So he made a page. One URL to share. Easy to remember. Easy to update. And more importantly, a public declaration of priorities. Sivers wrote,
"It's a nice reminder for myself, when I'm feeling unfocused. A public declaration of priorities. (If I'm doing something that's not on my list, is it something I want to add, or something I want to stop?)"
omg.lol can even remind you to update it periodically, which is the kind of thoughtful feature that shows someone actually cares about helping you use the tool well.
Over 2,300 people worldwide now maintain /now pages. It's become a movement, a way of saying "here's what matters to me right now" instead of fragmenting your attention into infinite micro-moments of engagement.
Remember when you could set a status on AIM or MSN Messenger? "brb, homework" or "listening to Dashboard Confessional again" or "please someone talk to me I'm so bored"? status.lol brings it back. No feed deciding who sees it. Just a status. Updated whenever you want. Visible to whoever checks. Social media giants like Instagram and Facebook have tried to revive this feature in a pitiful way, but it really isn't the same, is it?
Next, our status automatically syncs to social.lol, omg.lol's Mastodon instance.
If you don't know what Mastodon is, it's like Twitter, but federated. No single company owns it. Different servers (called "instances") run independently but can talk to each other. You own your data. You can move servers without losing your followers. The timeline is chronological. There are no ads.
social.lol is functional and it's active. I got 30 followers in my first day, which might not sound impressive until you realize these are real humans who chose to follow because they found my profile interesting, not because an algorithm decided to surface me to juice engagement metrics.
There's also IRC. Yes, Internet Relay Chat. The open standard quietly powering communities since the Internet began. It rules. The server includes a built-in bouncer, so your connection can persist even when you close your client and come back later. It's modern IRC too (IRCv3 stuff), so compatible clients can do avatars, typing indicators, emoji reactions, message edits/deletes. There's even a karma system (type penelope++ and feel alive), and an IdleRPG game running in #IdleRPG.
And if you're more of a "chat, but make it federated and standards-based" person, omg.lol also includes XMPP (formerly Jabber). They also host a community Discourse forum at discourse.lol, which is a place for longer-form discussion.
The community is warm. Thoughtful. The kind of place where people talk to each other instead of performing for an audience.
Now, what else is there? Well, to start, you get email forwarding. Give people your omg.lol address, something like brennan@omg.lol,and emails forward to your actual address automatically.
Why does this matter? Because it means you can give out a stable, memorable email that isn't tied to Gmail, Outlook, or whatever corporate service you're currently using. If you switch providers, your omg.lol address stays the same. No more "hey everyone, new email address" announcement when Google inevitably does something terrible.
They also partner with Fastmail if you want that to be your real email, a privacy-respecting, Australian-based service that doesn't read your messages to sell you ads.
some.pics is their image hosting service. Upload images. Share them. Store as many as you want (within reason, this isn't Google Photos trying to become your life's archive).
No compression artifacts unless you choose them. No AI scanning your photos to sell you stuff. No sudden policy changes that lock features behind paywalls. Image hosting the way it ought to be.
url.lolcreates PURLs, permanent URLs. Use your domain as a URL shortener. Store whatever URL you want on your domain name. No link rot. No service shutting down and breaking all your links.
Similarly, paste.lol lets you store text snippets internally in your dashboard and share them if you want. Like Pastebin, but integrated into your existing ecosystem and not covered in ads.
omg.lol also has a small-but-massively-useful feature: Keys. You can store and share your public keys right from your address page. PGP, SSH, age, Cosign, Minisign. The whole "yes I actually live on the Internet" starter pack. And if you upload a PGP key that contains your omg.lol email address, omg.lol will serve it via Web Key Directory (WKD) requests.
And then there's a little love letter to the old Unix-y web, omg.lol offers a Tilde Lite(tm) experience. Everyone gets a special tilde version of their profile page (like omg.lol/~foo) that acts as the aesthetic-equivalent of the Tildeverse.
While all of the above are features touted on their homepage, there's actually even more in active beta development you access to when you sign up. Such asproven.lol letting you prove any URL or domain is owned by you with a simple code snippets. Useful for verification on platforms that matter.
And then there's source.tube, a brand new GitHub alternative powered by Forgejo, giving you 500MB of storage for your code projects. As Adam Newbold announced in November 2025: "An independent community code forge has been pretty high up on the list of things that omg.lol members have requested over the years, and it's finally here today."
It runs on Hetzner's European infrastructure, not Amazon's surveillance capitalism cloud. It doesn't cost extra. It's just there, included in your $20/year.
I'm planning to use it to mirror a few of my projects, enjoying the small thrill of having my code live somewhere that isn't owned by Microsoft (who owns GitHub) or any other tech giant that might decide to train AI on it without asking.
How much does all of the above cost?
**Twenty dollars a year. **Not $20/monthly, but yearly. You get a digital ecosystem replacing most of what Big Tech holds hostage behind paywalls and surveillance.
And before I go further, let's sit with that number. Twenty dollars. Per year. That's ~$1.66 per month. Less than a single coffee. Less than Netflix, Spotify, or any streaming service. Less than Medium's $5/month, which in comparison, gives you only the ability to read articles without hitting a paywall.
For that price, which feels almost impossibly modest, you get all of the above. And what really gets me is that nearly every major corporate-owned dystopian social media hellhole can be replaced by this single service.
Facebook profile? omg.lol profile.
Twitter? social.lol (Mastodon).
Medium? weblog.lol.
Linktree? Your omg.lol profile page.
Imgur? some.pics.
Bit.ly? url.lol.
GitHub (for small projects)? source.tube.
and Proofs, Keys, IRC, XMPP, ~tildeverse
All of this. For $20. Per year.
omg.lol even has sponsorships available if you're marginalized or can't afford it. Because Adam Newbold seems to understand that the Internet should be for everyone, not just people who can afford venture-capital-subsidized "free" services that monetize their data. This is what the Internet was supposed to be. Small. Weird. Personal. Made by people who care, for people who care.
We've been burned by platforms before. Twitter became X, a nazi bar. Facebook became a privacy-violating ad-delivery mechanism occasionally shows your aunt AI shrimp Jesus and conspiracy theories. Medium started charging readers while paying writers less. Every startup that promised to be "different" either got acquired (RIP Tumblr's weird creativity, murdered by Yahoo then Verizon and semi-salvaged by Automattic) or enshittified themselves chasing growth (looking at you, Discord).
omg.lol feels different because it's small by design. Adam Newbold isn't trying to scale to a billion users. He's not taking venture capital. He's not building a unicorn or chasing a liquidity event. He's just building good tools for people who want to have their own corner of the Internet.
The business model is refreshingly simple. You pay $20/year, you get these services. That's it. No dark patterns. No premium tiers. No "growth hacking." No pivots. When was the last time a tech platform made you smile just from using it?
If you're on Medium reading this, you're probably a writer. You probably care about having a platform for your work. You've probably been frustrated by Medium's paywall dance, wondering why your views and reads are down.
weblog.lol might not have Medium's network effects, since it doesn't have the same discovery mechanisms. But it's yours. Your blog. Your domain (you can point your own custom domain to it). Your words. Your design. No algorithm deciding who sees your work. No paywall keeping readers out unless they can afford $5/month.
And you can have both. Post your thoughtful, long-form work on weblog.lol. Cross-post to Medium if you want their audience. Use omg.lol as your permanent, stable home that no company can take away.
How To Join
If I've successfully convinced you to give it a try, click here to sign up. That's my referral link, which means you'll get the same $20/year price, and I'll get a small credit if you join.
But honestly? Whether you use my link or not, whether you join omg.lol or find another independent platform, the important thing is this:
Take back your corner of the Internet.Stop building on rented land. Stop trusting platforms that see you as product. Stop waiting for some company to make the "perfect" tool.
I'm excited about the Internet again. Places like omg.lol prove that another web is possible. A web made by people, for people. Where you own your corner. Where tools are tools and not manipulation engines. People over metrics, sustainability over growth, joy over optimization, community over conquest. These are the values I want the Internet to have.
And the tools already exist. The community already exists. The independent web is already here, quietly thriving while Big Tech implodes under its own extractive weight. All you have to do is join it.